Last week I was a guest on a podcast about agility and future technologies. The conversation quickly settled on the idea that agility is the answer to the challenges of the future. Oh. Bold claim, and one I’d like to give some room today. My short version: agility is the framework, and the answer is the personal development that happens inside it.
The Problem Is Us
First question: where do these challenges actually come from? Is software causing them? Is AI to blame? Or nuclear reactors? I’d say no, the problem isn’t the technology itself. Technology is like a knife: it’s up to us what we do with the tool (save lives or ruin them).
And deep down we’re not so wicked that we cause trouble on purpose. We get a lot of things right, too. But even if every one of us means well, taken together and as a system we’ve piled up quite a mess on our lovely spaceship Earth: climate change, a tangled social situation, a highly dynamic economy and volatile markets. And there we sit in the middle of all this commotion, understanding maybe half of it, overwhelmed by the other half, and electric cars are supposed to save us now? No, they aren’t.
The Solution Is Us, Not Technology
Technology alone won’t do it. Every tool needs a hero who knows how to use it, and that can only be us. The work is on us. It won’t be the electric car that saves us, but how we live mobility from now on. Not AI, but how we use it to protect biodiversity. And even the slickest CI pipeline only produces junk if we don’t use it within well-shaped work processes.
To think creatively about any of this, the conditions have to be right. Overload, stress and chaos kill every good idea before it can sprout. A change of scene, movement, joy and talking with like-minded people as equals, on the other hand, spark ideas and fresh thinking. And last but not least, we need the ability to cope with crises, setbacks and uncertainty: high resilience. Tools don’t give us any of that. Personal development does.
Is Agility Personal Development for Teams?
The first definition of personal development Google spits out is: “Personal development is the development of the person.” Right. Scholars dug much deeper into the subject long ago, big names like Freud, Jung, Adler and Erikson. Many schools, in all sorts of flavors and combinations, now rule the huge personal development market. From business and life coaching, seminars, constellation work and retreats to gurus, energy work, even laying on of hands and angel brushing … there’s something for every taste. The field is vast and hard to see through, and the desire and need for it are enormous.
But strip away all the oddities in this field, and what’s left at the core is a triad of personal development:
- Self-awareness
- Self-acceptance
- Self-change
Hang on, aren’t those also the typical questions in an agile transformation?
- What can I do? What can we do? Where are my or our strengths? (awareness)
- What went well? What didn’t go well? (acceptance)
- What do I, what do we want to do differently now? (change)
Taking it further, I believe all the agile tools, methods and formats are there to support us in exactly this: developing our own agile way, our agile mindset (or whatever you like to call it). And that’s personal development.
Agility and the Future: My Answer
So is agility the answer to the future? I don’t think so. Huh? Yes, really! From where I stand, agility is the vehicle, a good, working framework for developing ourselves as individuals, as teams and as companies. That development is the answer. Fall down, get up, fix your crown, learn and keep going. So we get better and better at handling all the unknowns, uncertainties and challenges. So we raise our resilience and come out of crises stronger. And so we then have the freedom to shape our future creatively.
